Empowering POC and CALD Communities for Climate Justice
Conversation with Carrie Hou from Democracy in Colour
A couple days ago, my colleague Bre and I sat down (well, virtually) with Carrie Hou, Marriage Equality Campaigner from Democracy in Colour, and had a chat about organising People of Colour (POC) in the Marriage Equality campaign and in climate movement.
The entire chat was broadcasted live on Facebook and you can watch the recording in full here (skip to 5:00 for the start):
The motivation behind setting up this call was that — without erasing the amazing work of the POC organisers in the Australian climate movement — we remain as a predominantly white movement, and the whiteness only increases as the pay-grade goes up.
I knew Carrie from working with Democracy in Colour, a POC led organisation to address systemic racism in Australia, and have been deeply inspired by her and other POC leaders who worked incredibly hard to organise culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities during the Yes! for Marriage Equality campaign. Funnily enough, the intersection between racism and queer politics has been quite the focus ever since Western Sydney turned out to be one of the highest ‘No’ vote hotspots and an army of white queers immediately started — without much actual evidence — pointing fingers at the CALD communities. Overnight the Australian Muslim communities became scapegoats for both random nut-job brown terrorists and bigots. Wow.
One thing we really wanted to hear from Carrie was what concrete actions she reckoned white allies in the climate movement could do to support and empower POC and CALD communities and she did not disappoint with these two clear actions:
1. For well-resourced NGOs, it’s a no-brainer: employ POCs, especially in senior positions — people outside of those communities can never organise as well as people who grew up living within them. Accept that and get on with it 🤷🏽
2. as for small grassroots groups — reach out and connect with groups and leaders in CALD communities, build those relationships and support them when you can.
Working in a decentralised movement means it’s impossible to control every public exposure, from Fossil Free to the Stop Adani movement, there are times when dog-whistling racism seeps through — maybe it’s a tweet from a local group or somebody’s comment on a Facebook post, and it’s hard to stop that from happening. But as organisers it’s not enough for us to just distance ourselves from those kind of comments when it happens. To create safe spaces for POC and CALD communities to be involved, we have to actively tackle the structural racism within our movements. That may look like not promoting a racist and sexist radio shock jocks (surely we can find someone that didn’t call POC migrants ‘vermin’… right?), or confronting the racism embedded in our society by talking about it openly, educating our bases and linking it to our fight for climate justice.
Another important point Carrie brought up was the multitude of climate stories that we could be telling, especially when many POC, CALD and migrant communities have witnessed and experienced first-hand impacts of climate change, e.g hurricanes and floods in SE and South Asia, droughts in Africa and air pollutions in China and India, not to mention the monstrosities the mining industry has done and continue to do to First Nations Peoples and Global South communities. By blindly prioritising performance metrics and telling a selective narrative on climate, such as the Great Barrier Reef just because it works the best with our existing audience (often white and middle-class background), organisers like us in the climate movement risk creating an identity bubble — the less diverse our audiences are, the narrower our narratives become which in turn restricts our audience further.
What is your biggest takeaway from the webinar? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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